Wild Flourishing
Faith Evangelista-Naguit
Every summer, it is the same. My husband’s parents would pick out the bounty of harvest from the calamansi tree in their backyard, then painstakingly cut and squeeze every single coin-sized fruit, its juices running through a sieve and filling up bottle after bottle.
It was a process that fascinated me. Manila-raised for much of my early life, I was a city girl unfamiliar with the rhythms of the soil, of anything that grew from the ground. Vegetables existed as bundled-up stems in the market, fruits a foreign thing my parents force-fed me after dinner.
Not so for my in-laws, though, who cultivated a sprawling garden at the back of their home and saw the earth not as a thing to be tamed nor feared, but befriended. Partnered with.
The first time I saw those neatly arranged bottles, the sheer volume of juice had puzzled me. ‘Mum,’ I’d called out to my mother-in-law, her fridge door held open. ‘Para sa’n yung calamansi?’ What’s all this calamansi juice for?
‘Sa… ano,’ she began haltingly, clucking her tongue as she searched for the words before settling on: ‘Kung anu-ano.’
Kung anu-ano. For everything.
It made sense, then, all that juice. Calamansi is for everything. It is a powerful condiment, a seasoning for all seasons. It is for fish — bangus, tilapia, the raw ceviche we call kinilaw. For pansit, whether palabok, Malabon or bihon. For meat marinades. For soups. For juice. For hot tisanes. For whitening skin.
For imagining, even, that your backyard is home.
…
The calamansi is not native to Australia. There are no immediate sources that tell us how it came to grow here, or how prolific its trees are — only cheerful notes on local gardening websites which refer to the fruit as ‘bountiful’, and the anecdotal evidence that seemingly every second Filipino family I know has cultivated a thriving tree in their backyard.
Depending where you are and how cold it is, the fruit can ripen to its normal green, or to amore distinct orange. No matter, the inside remains the same — a sharp, sour-sweet citrus hit, undercut by something distinctly floral. It is not difficult to grow a calamansi tree. It bears fruit as it should.
This flourishing is mirrored in our people. As the fifth-largest migrant community in Australia, Filipinos are everywhere. We are in all unexpected corners of cities and suburbs, in schools, hospitals, train stations, hotels, kitchens, banks, churches, corporate headquarters, parliamentary offices. Like the calamansi, we are a hardy species, flourishing in places we were never expected to, flavouring places and spaces that are new and unfamiliar.
There is, I think, an austere dignity in this — that we have transplanted, propagated, taken root and grown. Survival, after all, is the prime concern of the migrant, second only to usefulness.
Are you alive? Are you growing in your little plot of land? Are you providing for your family?
Are you a good citizen?
Good. Well done. Full marks. Naka-abroad, they’d say back home. Ang galing.
…
But it comes at a cost.
In the Philippines, my father was a pastor. Once a high school PE teacher, he’d left the profession to enter full-time ministry. Our move to Australia was the result of years-long petitioning by his brother, but partially, it was also motivated by an inkling of spiritual calling: specifically, a desire to plant a church.
That calling flourished and waned in different ways throughout the years — rich and sweet in some places, but undercut with the sour tang of bitterness and burnout in others. In that time, between pastoring gigs, my dad also took up work in a hotel in the Sydney CBD, in the housekeeping department. It’s a fact that I hold with a fierce, protective pride — he and my mum doing hard, thankless, unfamiliar work to provide for our family — while also knowing that the source of that pride must have been a blow to his.
Like so many other migrant parents, here were two individuals who were used to having and being so much — holding impossible dreams, aspirations for more — and yet having to make themselves smaller and less visible.
Helpful, functional, needed? Yes.
Recognised, acknowledged, permitted to dream? No.
It is the same story everywhere: essential and cheerful, we lift the dish. Useful for everything, but ultimately remaining unseen as we dissolve and assimilate into the plate.
You might even say, a little bit like calamansi.
…
But perhaps this is to underestimate what calamansi is, its wild flourishing.
When my husband and I bought our house, I was six months pregnant with my second child, irritable and immune to the bullshit of real estate agents. Ali, a brash go-getter, was hustling the place hard, and he didn’t really need to, given what was already in the backyard.
‘Mini mandarins,’ he said with a grin, gesturing to the boughs laden with orange fruit hanging over the fence we would soon share with our future neighbour.
‘It’s calamansi,’ I corrected, startled and starstruck at the discovery. There it was: this hardy little fruit, this symbol of resilience on foreign soil, finding me where I least expected it, on this tiny little patch on Dharug country that we were soon to occupy.
It’s been more than a year since we’ve moved in. The tree hasn’t stopped giving. My mother comes over and harvests a whole bunch when she knows she’ll be frying tilapia. On nights when I’m too scared to go out in case I step on the little blue-tongue lizard that sometimes nuzzles into our grass, I send my firstborn out to pluck the fruit.
‘It was easy, Mama,’ he says on his return, the tiny orbs fleshy and bright in his own tiny hands — hands that will never know the labour of his grandparents, but grateful for the gift within.
Easy. For him, it will be.
Like fruit falling to the ground.
Like the turning of a new page.
Faith Evangelista-Naguit migrated from the Philippines at age 13, and still calls Manila home. She is proud of both her Filipino heritage and her upbringing in southwest Sydney, where she is raising two children with her husband Miko. A lover of words, Faith works as a high school English teacher.